What caused the deaths of the frozen men is one of the cases at the center of “Night Country,” the other being the brutal murder years before of a young Indigenous woman. Investigating the two cases, whose connection gradually becomes clear, are two cops who hate each other, not in a funny or bantering way but with heavy sincerity.
Jodie Foster plays Danvers, the abrasive police chief of the remote Alaska mining town where the story is set, and Kali Reis plays Navarro, a dogged state trooper. Both characters carry crippling baggage: family deaths; troubled loved ones; wartime terror; the disadvantages of being female and, in Navarro’s case, Indigenous. On top of it all, they share a dark moment in their professional pasts, a secret that, like many things in the season, is frequently teased before being anticlimactically revealed.
And they are not alone in their dysfunction — nearly everyone in “Night Country” is beat up or broken down, angry or embittered. The exceptions are the saps: the preternaturally kind bartender, Qavvik (Joel D. Montgrand), whom Navarro uses for sex, and the puppy-dog deputy, Pete Prior (Finn Bennett), whom Danvers sees as a surrogate son and mercilessly overworks. They both border on caricature — men who are exceptional for being basically decent — but Montgrand and Bennett make them believable and sympathetic. John Hawkes can’t do the same for Prior’s father, Hank, a casually corrupt cop eagerly waiting for his online fiancée to arrive from Vladivostok; he’s a flat-out cartoon.
Arctic settings (the season was filmed in Iceland), shot with an emphasis on darkness and vast, empty landscapes, fit hand in glove with eerie horror motifs; close comparisons include John Carpenter’s “The Thing” and the British series “Fortitude,” a show that covers some of the same ground as “Night Country” but in a more diverting, less wearying fashion. López, with help from the cinematographer Florian Hoffmeister, deploys those elements in an atmospheric if convoluted mystery that looks and feels, for a couple of episodes, as if it might work its way to an interesting conclusion. But she can’t keep it under control — the mystery steadily dissolves into preposterousness, the characters sink into incoherence, and the horror isn’t original or evocative enough to carry things on its own.
The one way in which the season can be said to succeed, if only on the strength of its convictions, is as a representation of cultural and economic depredation — environmental damage from the mine is a factor in the mystery, and the story’s resolution is better explained by issues and emotions than by evidence or character development.
